In 1763, David Garrick shook up the theatre world by banning audience members from sitting onstage at Drury Lane.

Since the theatres had re-opened in 1660 (after the Restoration), it had become common practice to pay a few extra pennies for the privilege of sitting on the stage. A century earlier, audiences at The Globe were also often as concerned with being seen themselves as with watching the play – as one contemporary diarist, Thomas Platter, put it, ‘Anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny; but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a farther door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit… where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen then he gives yet another English penny.’

From the earliest staged performances, audience-watching has played a huge part. So it’s no surprise that the idea of people watching people watching a performance has seeped into theatre and opera, in the form of the play-within-a-play.

Perhaps the most famous example is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose ‘rude mechanicals’ provide much of the comedy with their ‘most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe'. Taking his cue from Shakespeare, Purcell incorporates a masque into his A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired The Fairy Queen. Rather than a comic interlude courtesy of Bottom and co., however, Purcell conjures the god Phoebus to oversee a masque celebrating the four seasons. Almost three centuries later, Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play becomes an opera-within-an-opera in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a scene where the composer sends up both the actors’ misguided dramatic intentions and 19th-century opera in one fell swoop.

In both Strauss’s Salome and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, a show-within-the-show proves to be a turning point. In Salome, we watch Herod voyeuristically enjoying Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ after his ill-advised promise to give her whatever she wants in return. Wagner’s opera, meanwhile, comes to a head with a singing competition between Nuremberg’s Guild of Mastersingers – with a rather happier ending than the singing competition in his earlier opera Tannhäuser.

Some works, though, take the idea further and explicitly frame the entire work as an opera-within-an-opera, unsettling the ‘real’ audience’s sense of reality. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is one such opera.

Originally written as a stand-alone divertissement to be performed after Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Ariadne auf Naxos was later re-worked, with a Prologue added to create the opera that is performed today. In the Prologue, Strauss introduces us to the composer, a music master, a wig-maker, some comedians and a prima donna diva. We see the comic and chaotic preparations for the evening’s entertainment – and then become the audience for the performance itself.

To completely different effect, Berg opens Lulu with a Prologue in which a circus ringmaster addresses the audience and introduces his menagerie – the prize of which is the ‘snake’ Lulu. Like Ariadne, though, the effect is to add another audience layer (or ‘diegetic level’), and to frame the rest of the opera as a performance. The palindromic film that comes half-way through the opera takes us another step deeper.

More recently, composers and directors have adapted this stage tradition to include television-shows-within-operas, to the same effect: think of Anna’s appearance on ‘Larry King Live’ in Turnage’s Anna Nicole and Jonathan Kent’s recent staging of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in which Manon dances for both a live audience onstage and a fleet of television cameras.

Composers, librettists and playwrights continue to be fascinated by our love of spectacle. And in the very best examples these make us question our assumptions about reality itself. When you’re watching an opera-within-an-opera, as Orwell didn’t quite say, you look from actors to audience, and from audience to actors again, but sometimes it’s impossible to say which is which.

Ariadne auf Naxos runs until 13 July 2014. Tickets are still available. The production is given with generous philanthropic support from Hélène and Jean Peters, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth and The Maestro’s Circle.

Antonio Pappano conducts the cast and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in concert at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on 6 July 2014. Tickets are still available.

The Wasp Factory is a controversial novel. The Irish Times said of its publication, ‘it is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity’ and the Sunday Express described the book as ‘a silly, gloatingly sadistic and grisly yarn of a family of Scots lunatics.’ The Times Literary Supplement decided it was sensationalism in the face of the writer’s previous rejections: ‘the surest way to make an impact with a first novel, if not the most satisfactory, is to deal in extremes of oddity and unpleasantness.’ We have the benefit of hindsight.

In place of the Stalinist-style political control that Orwell saw as the undesirable endgame of European totalitarian socialism we see untrammelled freedom. Banks gives us a scenario in which a teenager with a tendency towards megalomania and an obsession with torturing animals roams free, unmonitored by any form of authority. We are shown what disturbed humans are capable of when nobody is watching.

Frank, the protagonist, is not a legally registered citizen (a sort of Orwellian ‘unperson’) and his father keeps him hidden from the authorities on a ‘nearly-island’ on the North Sea coast of Scotland. Frank’s dominion over the ‘island’ and its fauna is slightly ridiculous, recalling the imaginary war games many children play. But there is nothing ridiculous in his dispassionate and sadistic capacity for murder, nor in the family saga of abuse and neglect that is described in the margins of the story.

Paul Morley, in his programme article for Ben Frost’s opera (which received its premiere at Bregenz Festival this summer and gets its UK premiere in the Linbury from tonight) was keen to keep much of the plot concealed. He wrote, ‘it is best for the audience to know nothing about what is about to happen, other than they are where the action is, and one more crazed thing leads to another, to more and more change, until there is, incredibly, nowhere else to go.’ We are presented with the story of a dangerously cunning sociopath who, left to his own devices, commits barely believable transgressions of what we might sentimentally (nostalgically?) call ‘conscience’. Few in today’s national climate would accept that it is best they ‘know nothing’ and let one crazed thing lead to another.

If The Wasp Factory struck a keynote in the early eighties, Banks’s seventh novel, Complicity (1993), pursues the tune. Margaret Thatcher's government spanned the decade that separates the two books and Complicity describes a series of sadistic murders committed in retribution for the victims’ selfish exploitation of the permissiveness of the Thatcher years. Banks’s response to Thatcher’s death in April 2013, two months before his own, was to comment that while he was respectful, her ‘baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished.’ His strong feelings go some way towards explaining the tone of these two shocking novels that bookended the Thatcher decade. Thatcher’s keenness to free the British economy from state control and the stranglehold of the unions could be seen as partly responsible for the barbarity of unregulated enterprise that has proceeded at the expense of other forms of freedom. Banks certainly saw degeneration and savagery in the societal changes linked to the free market of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In the wake of the Cold War and in the name of democracy, the project to avert an Orwellian nightmare has failed to take responsible precautions against the proliferation of simple, unconscionable selfishness. The Wasp Factory can be read as an allegory of what happens when sociopaths are allowed to wreak unbridled dominion over a small island. Perhaps rather than (or as well as) a sensationalist novel that launched the career of a highly political writer, The Wasp Factory is a leveled caution of the Orwellian kind.

The Wasp Factory runs from 2 – 8 October 2013 in the Linbury Studio Theatre. A limited number of tickets are still available.The production is staged with support from Capital Cultural Fund Berlin and Nordic Culture Point.